Reconstruction
by The Buzz
Summary: When Steve is captured by Hydra and tortured, Tony and Bucky have to work together to save him. It goes about as well as could be expected. (Based on the prompt:Post-Civil War, Tony and Bucky have to work together to save Steve from Hydra. Story is complete, will post every day or two.)
1. Chapter 1

Tony sat in the cushy chair in the Avengers facility common area, swilling fine scotch in a tumbler and staring at an empty TV screen.

We all need family. The Avengers are yours.

Well, Cap hadn't been wrong about the first part. It was only the second part, the part where the Avengers wanted anything to do with him at all, that was utter bullshit.

He drained his glass and poured another. Vision was off somewhere discovering humanity or something. Rhodey was still sleeping about 16 hours a day, when he wasn't at physical therapy or trying out whatever new device Tony forced on him that week (he claimed he was grateful, but still. Tony knew what he was doing). That left… no one. Bruce was in the wind, had been for years. Pepper was gone.

That last glass of scotch was gone too, and Tony looked into the cup, a little bemused. It didn't really make him feel better, per se, but it was—

His phone was ringing.

He let his last train of thought dissipate (dwelling on his feelings was never good, had never been good, but was especially not good now). He fumbled for his phone, because there were so damn few people who would call him on this phone, his personal phone, that it had to be something important. (Not like anyone would call just to say hi, or ask how he was dealing with the crushing loneliness and guilt.) Dusk had fallen since he'd settled into the chair and he squinted at the StarkPhone's too-bright screen.

Withheld.

Weird. Nobody had this number except Vision and Rhodey and Pepper and… and Steve.

At some point, his heart had started pounding in his chest, beating against the scar tissue where the arc reactor used to be.

He thumbed the icon to pick up, barely daring to breathe. There was no picture but the voice came through clear.

"Stark?"

It wasn't Steve's voice. Tony shifted in his seat and tried to pretend to himself that a devastating sense of disappointment hadn't just descended over him. He was drunk enough that he could almost do it.

"Who's this?" he returned in a sharp voice. The voice sounded extremely familiar, and kicked up a wave of anxiety he didn't entirely understand, but he didn't recognize it at first.

"Bucky."

"Bucky," Tony repeated, because maybe he'd lost his mind after all, or someone had slipped something in his scotch and now he was having wacky hallucinations. It was Bucky, Bucky who had killed his parents, Bucky who Tony had tried to murder in cold blood just two months ago. Of course it was Bucky.

"Yeah. I need your help."

Tony snorted. He started babbling before his brain had really caught up with the idea that Barnes was on the other end of the phone. "What's this, a practical joke? Did Barton put you up to this? Nah, he hates my guts now, he only reserves practical joking for friends and acquaintances. Was it—"

"Shut up, Stark."

Bucky's tone was so flat and serious that Tony actually did as he was told. For a moment, because it was really all he could think, he considered interjecting, I'm sorry I tried to kill you.

Bucky went on, "I'm going to send you a file. Watch it."

The holographic screen flared to light before he could protest. The picture was oddly grainy, like it had been shot by a security camera or something of the sort. At first it was too dim to make out the picture, but Tony's gut clenched as the brightness rose and he could make out the outline of a familiar tall, muscular figure pressed against a wall, arms outstretched like they were being held up by chains. There was a hood over his face.

"Fuck," Tony muttered.

Four blurry figures entered the frame. The man in chains—Steve, it was obviously Steve—bucked and tore at the chains, the muscles in his arms cording. It didn't work. One of the figures slammed a heavy bat into his ribcage and he jerked violently. Silently, in bad black and white, each of the figures took turns laying down a beating, for what felt like hours thought it could only have been minutes, until even through the bad quality Tony could see bruises and blood covering his frien—covering Steve's body. All throughout the beating Steve had remained taut, fists clenched above him.

The video cut out.

"You still there?" Tony asked Barnes hoarsely. He'd been able to hold his liquor pretty well since he was 15 but his stomach was roiling now.

"Yes," Bucky said.

"All right, then, why did you call me?" Tony asked, his mouth still moving too fast because this was too damn much to process and he was at least half a bottle deep at this point. "You've got a whole cadre of super friends living in a Wakandan mansion with you if the rumors are true. I must be bottom of your list, why did you call me?"

"Because I need your help," Bucky said again, patient as only an ex-assassin can be. His tone was as unreadable. "The file is heavily encoded. King T'Challa tried breaking it. No one else has anything close to your technical skills and resources." He paused a moment. "Will you help?"

"Of course," Tony said, because really it should have been obvious. "For Cap? Yeah. Of course. I'll get on it. Right away."

"I'm coming to you," Bucky said.

"To me," Tony repeated, wondering vaguely if his spiked scotch was making him hallucinate again. "As in, to the Avengers facility in a country where you are probably a… triply wanted man, or something."

"Yes," Bucky said.

"Of course you are," Tony said. The thought of facing Barnes, in person, after what had gone down in Siberia made his balls want to shrivel up and return to his body, but for Steve, honestly, he would face a number of even more ball-shrivelingly terrifying things. When it came down to it, joining forces with the man he'd recently tried to murder for the mind-controlled killing of his own parents was really on the not-so-bad end of the list of things he would do for Steve.

"T'Challa thought the message came from the United States," Bucky offered. "I don't want you decrypting it, trying to do something on your own, and ruining everything while we're overseas."

"Oh. Well. Okay. Makes sense then," Tony said, but Bucky had already cut the connection.

Bucky arrived six hours later in what looked like a refurbished Quinjet. By that time, Tony was about sixteen cups of coffee deep into his efforts to crack the location the video had been sent from and making good progress.

He extracted himself from the holographic screen he'd been glued to and went to meet the man at the door leading to the helipad. He forced himself not to scuff his feet and stare at the floor like an awkward teen trying to ask someone to prom.

Bucky hopped out of the Quinjet, jaw set, long hair swinging around his face. His missing arm was obvious in the deflated sleeve of his coat, sending yet another jolt of guilt through Tony's gut.

"Uh, hi," Tony said, giving him a small wave.

"Have you found the location yet?" Bucky asked bluntly. Ever the conversationalist.

"No," Tony admitted. "But I'm getting there. Hydra—you're sure it's Hydra, right? I'm, like, at least 98.9 percent sure it's Hydra, anyway, based on the electronic signatures—they must have known I'd end up taking a crack at it. It's got defenses that look like they were specifically designed to stop FRIDAY from getting in."

"Get on with it then," Bucky said stiffly.

"Uh, right now? Actually, I thought we should chat a while. Really get to know each other, you know, maybe make some daisy chains and talk about our feelings-does anyone even do daisy chains these days?" Tony said.

Barnes did not look amused. The wind cutting across the helipad (nothing like the wind at the top of the Tower where the old helipad had been, but strong enough) whipped his hair around his face dramatically, making him look perhaps even less amused than he would have otherwise. Or maybe not.

Tony hastily appended, "…and I've got FRIDAY running algorithms as we speak. Nothing for me to do at the moment."

Bucky just pushed past him and walked through the open door into the compound.

Tony turned on his heel and followed him, muttering to himself, "Well, this is going to be fun."

* * *

It was dark and chilly and Steve's body ached. His wrists were raw in the chains and the hot drip of blood down his raised arms was just persistent enough to be annoying despite the pain. His chest was a mess—broken ribs and deep bruises and long lacerations where the nails hammered through a two-by-four had torn into his skin. His right ankle was broken, a souvenir of his capture, which forced him to balance on his left leg to keep the pressure off his arms. He was thirsty.

None of it mattered, because his friends were in danger.

Hydra, in true supervillain-wannabe fashion, had told him some of their plan, after they'd chained him to the wall but before they'd beaten the stuffing out of him. A video that only Tony Stark could decrypt. A ruse to force Steve's friends to come out of hiding and join forces to save him. It got a little fuzzier from there. But whether they were planning to bring them all down together, or use Stark to fracture the budding superhero community further, it wasn't clear.

"Or maybe," the agent had told him in a smug German lilt, "We're just going to blow them all up."

Whatever the specifics, people that Steve cared about were in need of his help, and that meant he had to do something.

No. He was going to do something. It didn't matter that he was alone and injured and drugged with something that made his muscles weak—and meant that despite having been held for almost half a day, his ankle hadn't started knitting back together.

He was going to save them.

* * *

Tony had done all he could. Well, that sounded dramatic. He'd put in place all of the decrypting algorithms that he needed to trace the source of the video, and unless something went wrong, that meant all there was to do was wait. For another two hours or so. With Barnes.

Not going to be awkward at all.

Of course, Bucky had already spent all of the last seventeen hours sitting about three feet away from Tony in a faux-relaxed slouch, watching him with a completely unreadable (aside from the fact that it was definitely Not Friendly) expression. But during those seventeen hours Tony had been extremely busy, checking and double-checking the code and trying out new decryption tactics and generally having enough on his mind to distract him from the one man in the world who seemed to have even less of a sense of humor than Steve.

"You, uh, hungry?" he asked Bucky. He'd ordered in Thai…at some point, but it had been light out then and it had been dark for a while, so he figured it had been several hours.

"Yes," Bucky said.

Tony sighed at the monosyllabic response, already keying in an order into the Starkphone app. "Well, there's nothing to do now but wait. I'm going to take a shower in my suite, which you are not invited to, but you are welcome—nay, encouraged—to go to your own suite and do the same." He'd had FRIDAY set up a guest suite for the former assassin as soon as he'd hung up the night before. "Pizza'll be here soon."

"I'll stay here," Barnes grunted, indicating the console Tony was abandoning with a jerk of his chin.

It occurred to Tony for the first time that maybe he wasn't being an absurd shadow to Tony because he didn't trust him to stay on task, or to inform him when he finally cracked the encryption, or because he thought Tony would stab him as soon as he had his back turned. It had to be that Bucky didn't want to miss the moment when Steve's location finally popped up.

Tony's tone softened a little at the realization. "It's not going to happen before the pizza gets here. I promise."

Bucky's eyes were steely. As usual. "You don't know everything."

It was something about the way he said it, little knowing curl of his lips, the slight smugness to his tone, that made every bit of sympathy Tony had started to feel freeze up in an instant, like it'd been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The words he'd shouted at Steve hadn't stopped echoing through his head for weeks (Did you know? DID YOU KNOW?) and here was Bucky telling him he didn't know anything.

He felt guilty for having snapped and gone after Bucky when he'd seen the video. He knew intellectually that Bucky had been under someone else's control just as Barton had been under Loki's control before New York. But that didn't change the fact that it was his hands who had snuffed the life out of Howard and Maria Stark so many years ago, his hands that had sent Tony into an alcohol-fueled tailspin that nearly cost him the company he hadn't even inherited yet and had let Obie step in and hey, look at that, another whole swathe of his life he had no desire to think about ever again. Fine. In his head he didn't blame Bucky anymore, hadn't really since he'd come home beaten and tired and finally slept long enough to realize he'd been acting exactly like the kind of revenge-crazed lunatics the Avengers were sworn to put down. But that didn't change what had happened and he wasn't going to let himself be mocked.

"Look," Tony snapped at him, standing up because he hated that even sitting, Barnes towered over him. "I'm here because Steve needs me. Steve. You and I—we don't have to get along, as long as we get him back. But you do not get to talk to me like that."

"Like what?" Bucky said, and it took everything Tony had to take a step back rather than forward to punch him in his smug face.

And then it occurred to him that maybe Bucky hadn't meant anything by it, maybe it had been an innocuous bit of phrasing that Tony had interpreted wrongly because he was wrapped up in his own problems and fears and pain. All Bucky had said was that he didn't know everything, which was absolutely true in this case. Tony had heard the one word and assumed Bucky had gone in for the heart and reacted, without thinking, again.

"Pizza'll be here soon," Tony mumbled, spun around, and left. He turned the shower to boiling hot and stood under the spray, wondering how the fuck he was going to do this.

Steve's hands were numb. It wasn't surprising, really, since they'd been chained above his head, suspending a part of his weight, for more than a day now. Still, once the thought had occurred to him it was hard not to notice. His wrists, on the other hand, were raw and painful and sticky from the chains. The good news was that his healing factor seemed to be picking up again. The bruises on his chest were already turning yellow and green and the more minor cuts had already faded to white lines that would disappear before long. His ankle no longer ached as fiercely as it had, but it had never been set, and he had a sinking feeling that it was knitting back together crooked, his foot over-pronated so that the sole of his foot faced inward just a bit too much. It still hurt to put any weight on it and it would be a bitch (pardon his language) to reset later, but he was still in better shape than before. Of course, with the healing came ravenous hunger and an increasingly uncomfortable thirst, but it was a worthwhile tradeoff. Soon, he'd be ready to make his escape.

The leader of the Hydra cell who'd caught him was back. To gloat, of course.

"They'll have found your location by now," he said. Steve still didn't know his name. It was driving him a little crazy at this point. The man had a long, pointed face and pale skin. Pointy Face, then. "Or perhaps it will take a few more minutes. I may have overestimated Stark's abilities. He and your friends will all be on their way soon, I imagine."

"And you think you stand a chance?" Steve asked. His mouth was so dry that it came out as more of a croak than anything.

"I think we are well-prepared for the Avengers' assault on… well, that would be giving it away, wouldn't it?" Pointy Face smirked.

"Where are you sending them," Steve said in as commanding a voice as he could manage.

Pointy Face just kept smiling. "I should like you to ponder that question a little longer. To wonder what will become of them."

Steve set his jaw and glared at him with all of the righteousness he could muster.

Unfazed, Pointy Face gestured for two hulking guards to step closer. "Of course, I can't have you growing too strong while you wait," he said. "My…associates here will see to it that you remain, how shall I say, malleable."

One of the guards was holding a heavy bat. The other had a knife. Steve tried not to sag in disappointment—it would be far harder to escape and save his friends in time if he were given another beating like the last one.

But then, that was the point.

Pointy Face stepped back, a sadistic look of pleasure painting his face as Guard #1 smashed his bat directly into Steve's damaged ribs. He screamed through clenched teeth at the loud pop of bone and panted through the pain—until the guard swung again, the bat hitting with a wet crunch and leaving a section of his bare chest horrifically concave. Steve suppressed a cry, and tasted blood on his lips.

Then Guard #2 was beside Steve, his knife glinting in the dim overhead lights of the basement they were keeping him in. Even steeling himself for pain, he wasn't prepared for the utter agony of the sharp blade driving into the meat of his bicep all the way up to the hilt. Then twisting. Steve screamed.

At least his hands were numb.

Still, with every cut and blow, he reminded himself of the only thing that mattered. Getting free, and making sure Hydra didn't hurt anyone else on his account. He just had to hold out and wait for his moment. It was all that mattered.


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky stared at the open pizza box, frustrated at his own indecision. All of the pieces were the same. They looked pretty good, actually, covered in some combination of sausage and vegetables that Bucky had never seen on a pizza before. It was times like these that he was sharply aware of how much had been stolen from him. How many years he'd spent traveling the world and leaving destruction in his path, or fleeing that same destruction, and he'd never actually ordered a pizza for himself. Never had the choice of which piece he wanted—the one with all the sausage or the one with the big knot in the crust? It made him freeze, as if he was waiting on orders, and he hated that. At least in Wakanda, T'Challas's chefs made everything and divided it up onto plates.

"Any day now," Stark said. He was standing behind Bucky with a plate in his hands, impatience personified. He probably thought Bucky was taking his time on purpose.

Finally he grabbed the piece with the big doughy knot and retreated from the box, his heart pumping. He hated that too.

Stark grabbed two pieces, without any apparent thought at all, and popped them into his plate. They were back to sitting beside the holographic monitor, waiting for the decryption. Stark had returned a few minutes earlier bearing the pizza, but hadn't made any mention at all of his hurried exit from the room. That was just as well. Bucky had no desire to deal with the pain of a man who had let Steve down the way Tony had.

That was what it came down to, really. It didn't bother him so much that Stark had tried to kill him. He wasn't the first, and Bucky always found it hard to argue with them. But Steve - Steve deserved better.

Bucky settled in and took a bite of the pizza. It was good.

According to Stark, it would be another forty-five minutes before his algorithm revealed where the message had originated. Bucky didn't trust him as far as…as far as Stark could throw him. Without the suit.

Stark nearly fell off his chair, pizza slice halfway to his mouth, when the monitor starting beeping. "What the—" He hastily set his food down on the plate and hovered over the hologram, the shock plain on his face.

"What is it?" Bucky asked.

"It's done," Stark said disbelievingly. "I've got an address. T'Challa was right—it's in the U.S. Virginia, specifically. That's it. We've got it!"

"That didn't take 45 minutes," Bucky felt compelled to point out.

The glare Stark gave him was only slightly tempered by his obvious relief. "Well, tell your super friends to get their asses over the Atlantic and back us up." He made a complicated looking gesture with one hand and piece of Iron Man started flying over from across the lab and attaching to him, making Bucky jump like he'd been electrocuted. (He hated that, too.) "And suit up. Do you suit up, or is it strictly casual wear, with you? Whatever. We have to move."

It might have been the first thing Stark had said that Bucky hadn't disagreed with. "Yeah," he said. "Let's move."

* * *

The address belonged to a government facility of some kind, just outside of DC. Top secret—more than that, top secret enough that Tony couldn't immediately hack into their servers to find out the floor plans or even what went on there. That meant deep, serious Hydra infiltration. It also meant that getting Rogers out was going to be a bitch. Their plan was to start with some recon, then, depending on the situation, either wait for reinforcements or handle the situation themselves. Tony was always a fan of the latter.

Tony was riding in the 'jet, his armor already on. He could have flown alongside—and considering that Bucky was his only company, would probably have been a more enjoyable ride—but something had been niggling at him that he needed both hands for. So he let Bucky pilot the 'jet and hunched over a StarkPad.

They'd been in their air maybe thirty minutes when Tony said, "Shit."

"What?" Bucky asked in his usual monotone.

"I knew there was something weird about that. I knew it," Tony said.

"What," Bucky growled again.

"My timing was off. In decrypting the file. ," Tony said. "My timing is never off. Turns out it wasn't a mistake on my part. Of course. There were layers to the deception, one location they wanted me to decode, and one they didn't. Guess which one is which."

"We're heading the wrong way," Bucky interpreted.

"Yep," Tony said, popping the p. "I'm patching the right coordinates in now. It looks like… we should be heading toward Arizona instead. Middle of nowhere desert as far as I can tell."

A few minutes of Barnes' glowering and punching in coordinates later they were heading in the right direction. They'd sent along the information to the others flying in from Wakanda, but communications between 'jets were worse than spotty over those distances. They'd have to hope for the best.

Worse, what would have been a quick, forty minute hop from New York to northern Virginia in the 'jet would now be about two hours. Still better than flying commercial, or even flying his own private jet, but not damn well fast enough. They hadn't received any new communications from Hydra but Tony would bet his garage Cap wasn't being treated well.

Tony tried not to reflect too much on the irony that the last he'd seen Steve, he'd been the one trying to do the damage. It seemed like ages ago and at the same time he could still feel the reverberation of the shield against his armor. It was surreal, really. The whole thing had been a clusterfuck from the beginning. Usually Tony was good at picking out the exact point things had started going wrong because of him, but in this case… he just didn't know. It hadn't been wrong to support the accords. And each step he'd taken had been absolutely necessary, at the time, as the situation had spun further and further out of control. Well, up until the end. It might not've been the first mental breakdown he'd had, but it was certainly the most violent.

"We would have attacked a government facility," Bucky said.

"Wha?" Tony said dumbly, blinking to return his focus to the here and now.

"If we'd gone to the original coordinates. They wanted us to attack the government," Bucky said. "Wouldn't have gone well for any of us."

It was, possibly, the longest string of words he'd said to Tony yet.

"Smart," Tony commented, thinking it through. "You and the rest of the team are already fugitives, you'd have your asses stuffed back in prison the second you set foot there, with no Cap to bail you out this time. And me, well, what better way to discredit me than have me helping you do it? If they're gunning for the Avengers, well, it might've worked."

"It's a good thing you noticed," Bucky said.

Tony stared at him, a smirk growing on his face. "A good thing? You thought I did a good thing? Wow. I think we're bonding. I'm choking up a little."

"Shut up," Bucky said.

Tony did.

They lapsed back into silence, Tony alternating between triple-checking his work on the StarkPad and watching Bucky, who was staring out the front windshield with a mournful expression. He'd tied his sleeve under the stump of his metal arm, and Tony had a strange urge to ask him about it—did it hurt? Did it feel like anything at all? How had he controlled the prosthesis before and did it feel like there was something missing now?

He didn't. He turned back to the StarkPad and checked the time. They'd been in the air for an hour now, which meant…one more to go. His nerves were jittering. At least when he flew the suit to a location his pre-fight adrenaline had something better to do that make him tap his fingers incessantly on the armrest.

Barnes shot him a glare and he stilled. To his surprise, however, Bucky didn't admonish him for the noise.

"Can I ask you a question?" Bucky asked instead.

As with any other time he spoke, it came out sounding abrupt and almost unplanned. Like he'd had no intention to speak to Tony but against his better judgment it had happened anyway.

"Uh, yeah, sure," Tony said, still anxious. He wondered for a brief, irrational moment if Bucky was going to ask him about the arm.

"What was your... relationship... with Steve?"

Tony blinked. "My relationship."

"Yes," Bucky said stiffly. "Were you. Together. Before the accords."

Tony stared at him, aware that his mouth was slightly open but too shocked to do anything about it. He laughed. "Together…together?"

"Yes," Bucky said, looking at the floor. There was almost—almost—a flush to his cheeks. "I saw it in a magazine while I was on the run. It said that the two of you—that you—you know."

He sounded so flustered that Tony couldn't suppress the nervous giggle that climbed up his throat. "Uh, no," he said. "That was a tabloid. I remember that, actually, the paparazzi caught a picture of us standing close together at a gala and splashed it all over. But, ah, no. Ha! Not at all. Never. Anyway, Thor's obviously the better catch." He couldn't stop laughing.

Until he realized that utter relief had washed over Bucky's face.

"Oh no," Tony said. "You?" It would make a little sense, anyway, why Cap had been so gung ho about going after Bucky even if that meant flouting the law. And why he'd always gotten that sad, faraway look in his eyes anytime the lost Winter Soldier had been mentioned.

Bucky's eyes widened slightly, though the rest of his face didn't change. "No. Not like that. He's my friend. Since we were kids."

"Well, he's my friend too," Tony said, then amended, "was my friend. Well. Maybe we'll get there again. He sent me a letter, you know."

"I know."

They looked at each other for several moments, something almost like understanding passing between them for the first time. It was funny, really, but there was something else there—a depth of feeling, maybe you could call it—that made it plausible enough. Bucky obviously loved Steve, whatever form it took. And so did he. Tony let his chin tilt toward his chest and shook his head. "God. We gotta get him back, don't we."

"Yeah," Bucky said. "We do."

* * *

The coordinates Stark had pulled from the video led them to a remote stretch of Arizona desert, rocky and ridged in the distance by low mountains. There was nothing immediately obvious from the surface, but the 'jet's scanners—supplemented by Iron Man's—told them that there was a vast facility underground.

They touched down about half a mile out to minimize their chances of being detected by the base. Bucky checked his arsenal (more necessary to carry now than it had been before the fight with Stark) and prepared himself the mission. With the others still en route, possibly to the wrong location, he didn't expect it to take long before they were fully on the offensive.

At least, Bucky reflected, that was one more thing that he and Stark agreed on. Neither of them wanted to wait around.

The entrance to the base was a set of doors encased in concrete and half-hidden by a rock formation. Iron Man fried the locking mechanism with a beam from his wrist in a second and disappeared into the staircase. Bucky jumped after him. For a brief moment, he flashed back to the Howling Commando days, and a dozen missions that had begun this way, sneaking together into dingy enemy installments...except it had always been Steve in the lead, Steve he'd followed. He forced the memory away. There was no point in thinking of the past.

They were in a small, cramped staircase, the dry Arizona heat dissipating quickly as they moved underground. Iron Man moved forward, hovering just above the staircase. Bucky followed, silent as a cat, ready to shoot anything that moved. It was dark and stuffy and the concrete stairs were chipped, like they were old.

Something wasn't right.

Something wasn't right.

He didn't know what, but Bucky's senses were well enough tuned to anger that he didn't have to.

"Stark," he said.

Stark, already several yards ahead of him, turned around—

And then everything went to hell. It started as a spark of brightness from down below, which quickly burgeoned into a fireball and Bucky had a millisecond to think—BOMB!—before the heat and force enveloped them on all sides and then the force and brilliance disappeared into pain and darkness and nothing.

* * *

Steve felt the foundation shake. However deep in the compound it he was, it was subtle, but it dislodged dust from the ceiling above. It rained down on him for a few seconds before his sluggish, pained mind realized what had happened.

Something had exploded nearby.

He twisted in his chains, uncaring that the metal bit into his skin, or that his chest was a mess of bone shards and pain that seized every time he shifted an inch. It didn't matter. His captor's words echoed in his mind.

Or maybe we're just going to blow them all up.

His friends had must have come for him, and gotten caught in the blast. They could be dead or injured and in need of help. He had to do something. He wrapped his fingers around the chains and pulled.

"Gaaahhhh!"

The noise tore out of him like it had a mind of its own. The chains creaked against the moorings in the concrete ceiling, shaking loose more dust. Blood burbled up in his throat as he gasped against the pain, coating his mouth with a metallic tang. He kept pulling. His arms were shaking, pain radiating from a dozen stab wounds and cracked bones and God knew what else. It didn't matter. He had to get free. He had to help his friends. He hadn't had the strength before but now—he had to do it—he had to—

The first chain came free with a mighty jerk, breaking free from its housing in a shower of dust and concrete chunks. Steve cried out as all of his weight transferred to his other arm, pulling abruptly on his torn and battered joints. He wrapped his freed hand (no longer so numb as fiery pins and needles slammed through it) around the chain holding his other arm and used all of his weight to heave on it.

The second chain snapped free of its mooring in the concrete ceiling and Steve collapsed to the floor, scuffing his knees and palms on the concrete. The chains and manacles were still attached to his wrists but he was free, at least. He forced himself to stagger up, ignoring the shards of agony pulsing through his chest and his badly-healed ankle. He wrapped the chains around his hands, leaving the long ends free like twin whips—they were the best weapons he had for the moment—and limped forward. His bad ankle shook and shot agony through his leg but it didn't matter. None of it mattered.

Steve was going to save his friends.


	3. Chapter 3

The Iron Man suit was strong enough to withstand an impressive amount of force, heat, and pressure. What it wasn't meant for was to take was a bomb blowing up almost literally in his face and dumping half a ton of concrete rubble on top of him. Tony groaned softly, trying to make sense of the red alarms flashing all across the HUD while simultaneously taking stock of the damage the analog way. He was lying face down, his faceplate smashed into the rubble beneath him.

He could move a little—that was a good sign. Only a little, though, because a huge slab of concrete from their stairwell ceiling was lying across him. The HUD reported damage to the plating on his back and chest (consistent with the constriction in his chest and the growing ache of damaged ribs). His arms were outstretched in front of him, free of the slab, from when he'd reached out instinctively to break his fall when he'd gone flying. His legs—not so free. He wriggled, trying to pull free of the slab without dislodging anything else, and stopped with a bit-off "Fuck!" when everything from his right knee down exploded in pain. Sure enough, the HUD was flashing loudly about that too. Armor breach. A corner of the slab had hit his right calf with all the force of, well, a giant piece of concrete propelled by a bomb, and severely dented the armor and broken his leg with the shattering force of it.

Well, shit. He'd just have to work around that. He took as deep a breath as he could and put his options in order.

First. He had to get free from the slab that was still pressing down on his back and digging into his right calf. Couldn't do anything else until he did that.

Second. Had to find Barnes. Any normal person would've been killed but he knew that Winter Soldier was made of sturdier stuff, like Cap himself. He'd also been several yards behind Tony, and so a little closer to the surface and further from the bomb.

Tony planted his arms under him, using the armor's strength to raise his torso. It strained and the HUD flashed a few more warnings, but he managed to make some room. Unfortunately shifting the slab only dug it into his leg further and for a few seconds the pain stole his breath away. He managed to get his unhurt leg under him too, so he was on hands and one knee with the slab on his back, pinning one leg. Now it was just a matter of throwing it off.

He gritted his teeth and fired his repulsors at the ground. For an interminable second there was force but he wasn't moving, all the resistance centered on his leg and he screamed—and then it was enough and he popped free of the cement, nearly crashing into the adjacent wall.

"Ow, ow, shit, fuck, ow," he muttered, spinning around and trying to think past the throbbing agony in his lower leg. Locking what remained of the armor into a makeshift splint helped a little.

Step one, complete.

Step two. That was Barnes. He flicked away the warnings on his HUD and turned on the sensors. About half of them were malfunctioning but he immediately picked up a life sign several yards away.

Bucky had gotten lucky, then—he'd been thrown up and out of the staircase. So far, so good. His boot repulsor was malfunctioning so he limped over to the life sign and stumbled to his knees beside Barnes' prone body. Bucky was unconscious, blood from a gash in his temple trailing down his face and matting his hair. His clothes were torn and every inch of exposed skin was scratched or bruised and—God—a piece of rebar was sticking up through the small of his back.

Tony gripped his shoulder and shook him gently, half expecting him to die right in front of him. Instead he jerked into awareness (thanks, whatever super soldier serum variant made that possible) and immediately grabbed for Tony's throat.

"Whoa, hey, hey!" Tony said, pulling back. He retracted the faceplate so Bucky could see what he was grabbing at, not that Bucky would probably be any happier to see him than the Iron Man mask.

Bucky let go of him, blinking several times as awareness returned. Then he grimaced, feeling where the rebar was sticking through him. His fingers came away bloody.

"Help me up," he gritted at Tony.

"Are you sure?" Tony asked, because, well, rebar.

Bucky gave him a scathing look and started pushing himself up with his good arm, his torso moving slowly up along the length of the rebar, leading a blood-slicked length behind. His expression, strained but determined, barely changed despite what had to be unimaginable pain. Horrified, Tony moved in and helped him the rest of the way up.

Soon, they were both standing shakily, looking down at rubble-filled hole where the stairs had been. Bucky's gut and back were bleeding down his shirt but he barely seemed to pay it any mind. His eyes were slightly unfocused. Though he'd lost the gun he'd been packing on his way in, he'd pulled another one out of…somewhere.

"Are you all right?" Tony asked him, fully aware it was a silly question.

"Yeah," Barnes grunted, pressing his free hand to his side. "You?"

"Yeah," Tony lied.

For a moment they sat there, looking each other over.

"We have to find another way in," Bucky said.

"You think?" Tony said. He felt, for about half a second, an absurd desire to giggle. God, his leg hurt. And it was just starting to occur to him that they'd truly been played. The desire was mixed with an equally powerful urge to smash something.

The one thing working in their favor was that Hydra had obviously wanted them to storm the facility in Virginia, likely making the bomb a backup option. That might explain why there weren't Hydra agents swarming them now. Maybe the base was understaffed, or they were relying on the bomb to have killed him. Certainly, if they'd moved a little faster and been deeper into the stairway, it would have.

"A way in. Yeah," Tony said.

"What kind of artillery do you have in that suit?" Bucky asked.

"Uh…" Tony said, flicking his eyes to check the flashing warnings again. "I got a couple shoulder rockets functioning. You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I think we can blast our way in," Bucky said.

"Worth a shot," Tony said.

They limped forward together, Tony's shin supported but just barely by the remains of his armor, Bucky stiff on the side that had been impaled by the rebar. (It was still bleeding, a fact that Tony elected not to mention.)

The stairway was little more than a hole in the ground now, but it had to lead to an access point of some kind. The first shoulder missile put a dent in the rubble that had collected near the surface. The next one widened the passage considerably. Two more and most of the collapsed concrete and earth that was barring their way had vaporized. There were still chunks of concrete and earth to move out of the way, but—hard as that would be, given their injuries—they had a way in.

Bucky stood off to the side, half a smirk on his pale, dirty face. "Not bad, Stark."

Tony fired his boot repulsors, hovering a few inches off the ground. (Painful but less painful than walking.) He pulled his faceplate up, then grinned despite the pain. "Are we bonding? I think we're bonding."

"Shut up," Bucky said.

He did, but he didn't stop grinning.

* * *

Steve didn't get far. He staggered into the hallway, dragging the chains still attached to his wrists, and caught himself with one shoulder on the wall when his bad leg almost folded. He gritted his teeth and forced himself up, a singular thought forcing him onward. His friends. He had to save his friends.

One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Ignore the pain in his chest. Ignore the pain in his ribs. Take another step. Save his friends.

Had he been a little sharper, he probably would have heard the Hydra agents coming before he nearly walked headfirst into the barrel of a loaded gun. Dizzy and distracted by pain as he was, it caught him by surprise.

Pulling back, he lashed out with the chain on his right hand, catching the Hydra agent in front of him with its length and knocking him into the wall. There were more behind that one, though, and the first deafening shot that rang out sent fiery pain lancing through his thigh. Even as he dropped to one knee—his leg collapsing under him—he swung the length of chain again and caught another guard around the neck, dragging her down, then lashed out with his fist to smack one back into another. Another bullet slammed through his shoulder—perhaps they were trying not to kill him—and he felt the bone shatter, making his left arm swing uselessly by his side. He forced himself to stagger up, and to keep swinging (I can do this all day) but there were too many to fight like this, and before long they'd surrounded him and all it took was one solid blow to the back of his head to make him tilt over, stars cascading over his vision.

They handcuffed him roughly, indifferent to the damage to his shoulder, and threw him down face first on the ground.

"Get him chained up again," came a familiar German lilt. Pointy Face.

Steve moaned and tried to push himself up, but his face was pressed into the cool, dirty cement of the floor and he couldn't seem to find the strength. Was there a boot on his back? Maybe. He felt a little like he was going to be sick and a lot like he was going to pass out. Sensations he'd been used to once upon a time, but now they spelled trouble.

"And do it right this time," Pointy Face was saying. "Captain Rogers must pay for his insurrection."

Steve tried to mutter something, some promise that they wouldn't keep him down and that they'd never take his friends while he was still breathing, but then the butt of another gun smashed into the back of his skull and everything receded into darkness.

* * *

Clearing Stark's tunnel of remaining rubble was hard work, injured as he was, but Bucky threw himself into it without complaint. According to Stark's sensors, there was an entranceway a few feet beyond the pile of cement chunks and rock and dirt that Iron Man's rockets' had left behind. What lay behind that, they still didn't know.

That was fine. It meant Bucky had one job to focus on, and he was going to do it. Clear the rubble, get inside.

As he bent over and wrapped his arm around a boulder and heaved it up, grunting as the wound in his side gave a vicious throb, he reflected that having two arms would have made things a lot easier. Not having a concussion also probably would have been useful, since it was making him dizzy every time he straightened up. But hey. Bucky had learned the hard way, many times over, that you had to work with what you had.

He plodded toward the light at the other end of the tunnel and set the concrete down on a pile with a loud crack.

To his surprise, Stark was also clearing rubble with efficient purpose. From what little contact they'd had, Bucky had pegged Stark as a selfish man, one who would easily let his own needs and desires get subsume the needs of others. After all, what had his frenzy of rage in Siberia been if not that? (However deserved it might have been-but that, as always, was a thought for another day.) He'd also heard plenty of rumors circulating about the Avengers during his time on the run. Steve Rogers, anyone would tell you, was everything Captain America should be, brave and strong and true and all that. Tony Stark, well... they said that Stark only fought for himself, for glory or fame or fun. And for all Steve had expressed regret at how things with Stark had ended, Bucky had seen little that gave him reason to believe otherwise. Well, until now. There was no glory in this, no public waiting to shower him with adulation. Certainly, no fun. Bucky wasn't sure what was wrong with Stark's leg, exactly, but Bucky knew pain when he saw it, in the way Stark was favoring it—keeping all his weight on his left leg when he could, limping, stopping to catch himself on the tunnel wall once or twice. Getting to Steve was clearly agony but he was doing it with as much purpose as Bucky himself.

"Stand back," Stark said.

Bucky looked at him blankly, his concussed brain a little slower on the uptake than usual. "Why?"

He could practically feel Stark's annoyance radiating even through Iron Man's face plate. "I think we're close enough to the interior of the base now that I can blast my way in with repulsor power. Stand back."

Pressing a hand to his side, which was still searing relentlessly, Bucky took several steps back and waited.

Stark squared his feet as best he could, outstretched one hand, and fired. There was a loud boom as the repulsor slammed through the concrete and rubble between them and the entrance. When the dust cleared, Stark was standing in front of a large hole leading into a dim, dingy hallway.

"Bingo," Stark said quietly.

Bucky had about half a second to feel like they were finally getting somewhere before the click-click-click of safeties going off sounded from either side of the hole. An instant later they were staring down at the barrels of a dozen semiautomatics.


End file.
